A small dark-haired boy sat on the end of the sofa in his family's sitting-room watching as a number of black-clad people wandered about his home gathering in small knots, speaking with each-other in hushed whispers and occasionally sending glances his way. The words he heard most often were "That poor boy...".
Though he knew he shouldn't have been, what he was feeling most at the moment was boredom. As he was considering shutting himself in his room so he could play with his toys, a red-haired woman who was holding a black-haired newborn approached him.
"Hello Jimmy." the woman said, not talking down to him like the others who'd bothered to speak to him had done. "I was wondering if you could do something for me."
"What?" he asked.
"I have to look after my husband to make sure he behaves himself, but I can't do that if I have to look after the baby as well, so I was wondering if you could help me. I know that he will be safe with a brave boy like you." the woman who had "Uncle" Henry's catlike eyes said with a smile.
Jim stood in the middle of the wreck that towered over Spinner's End. Once it had been an active textile mill which had drawn families to Cokeworth from all over for generation after generation. Two such families that had been drawn here had been his who had come from Ireland and the Evans family which had originally hailed from Wales via Liverpool amongst other places. Both his parents and Henry Evans had worked in the mill during its final years before it had finally closed down upon the death of its final owner.
When the mill had died so too had the town. The first businesses along the town's high street shuttered days after the mill had closed, and now, nearly three decades later, Cokeworth's high street had three empty shopfronts for each active business, though he was working to change that since such blight was bad for his business which depended on people actually being able to pay for his services.
Today, the mill which brought up many memories for Jim had a practical purpose, as it was a nice, quiet, out of the way place where he could get some work done. While he generally let his business run itself, playing matchmaker and connecting people with what they needed at the time, he occasionally dove in and got his hands dirty in order to stave off boredom. He had several personal projects running, and this one had mostly been on the back burner for years because it was rather uninteresting, but even he had a sense of duty and honor, warped though it was.
Considering the image he projected during his infrequent forays into the public as "himself", many would be surprised by his working class origins. He'd been born in Ireland in 1974 to parents of modest means, and his family had moved to Cokeworth to get a job at the mill which was still hiring at the time soon after. His father had met Henry Evans at the mill, and they'd become fast friends, his father having not held the fact that Evans was the foreman against him since Evans had worked his way to the top rather than having had the position handed to him through connections. During those early days, he had frequently ended up at the Evans home where he had been watched by Mrs. Evans and occasionally her daughters who were frequently away dealing with lives of their own while his parents were at work.
Henry Evans had died in the August of 1979. His family had claimed that it had been from natural causes, but he knew otherwise, having been there at the time. It hadn't been members of the "hidden" wizarding community which had been going through a bloody civil war during that period that had done him in, as many who were in the know about the magical community suspected these days. Henry Evans was not what he had seemed. Sure, he was a devoted family man, and probably the best foreman the textile mill had seen prior to its closure, but one only needed to trace the trail of "industrial accidents" that had followed behind him all the way back to his youth in Wales to realize that wasn't all he was.
Violet Evans followed soon after. She'd been hiding the cancer from the children because she hadn't wanted them to worry. Following Violet's demise, the eldest daughter Petunia had shaken the last of the dust of Cokeworth from her feet and cut off all contact with her family's friends and their families who weren't of high enough social status for the image she tried to project in the upper-middle class neighborhood in which she lived with her husband Vernon. On the other hand, despite the fact that she was often busy, the younger daughter Lily had kept in touch with everyone up until shortly before Toby Snape's son had informed the neighborhood that she'd died.
When his own mother died in an automobile accident, leaving him with a distant and out of touch father who'd let him get away with anything and everything including murder, it had been Lily who had comforted him following the funeral.
It was because of this and everything else that he owed the Evans family that he was here today despite the mundanity of his task which could've been easily handled by one of his lieutenants or even contracted out had he been so inclined. When he was done, he might leave the end result of tonight's task for his other, more interesting project to find. It would be interesting to see what He would make of it.
Deciding that he'd left his prisoner waiting long enough as he stood around and reminisced about his early childhood, he walked up to the old supervisor's office where the man was tied to a chair and removed the bag from his head. The man who had been inbred to the point that he obviously looked it glared up at him hatefully. If looks could kill, he would've been a pile of ash.
Not in the least bit intimidated since he'd seen worse, he removed the gag from the man's mouth.
"Do you have anything to say for yourself?" he asked, sounding about as bored as he felt at the moment.
Clearing out the trash was an annoying chore, but it had to be done.
"The minute I'm free mudblood, you and your pathetic muggle family are dead!" the man snarled.
"You're mistaken." he said, allowing a reptillian smile to grace his lips. "You're the one who's dead. But first, I'm going to utterly destroy you."
"As if mugglespawn like you could do anything to a member of the Ancient House of..." the man started, arrogantly ignoring the predicament he was in until his attention was turned to the monitors that that had been set up across from the chair that the man was sat in.
"I'm sure you recognize this place." he said as he pointed to the monitor that displayed the interior of the tea shop that the man's wife frequented. An interior that contained his wife at one of the tables. The second monitor showed the Ravenclaw Common Room where the man's younger son was studying, and the third the shop where his elder son worked.
Over the next hour, he showed the man that no place was safe, not even Hogwarts, and that when he advertised the fact that he had contacts everywhere, he really meant everywhere. His mildly disinterested expression never wavered as he watched the man finally realize that what he was seeing wasn't a trick when the first pieces of evidence arrived. While this was more of a personal matter, it wasn't that personal.
"Why?" the man finally asked when all of his bluster and bravado had been bled away. "Why do all this? I never did anything to you."
"You tried to kill Harry Potter's family." he replied, just as disinterested with the answer as he'd been with the proceedings.
The man started laughing brokenly.
"You're just another one of his worshipers! Another one of the arse kissers who won't get more than five words out of him as he passes you in the street if that! He's not going to appreciate what you've done for him. He'll just arrest you like any common thug. I almost wish I could be there to see how he reacts when you tell him, seeking whatever scrap of approval you think you'll get." the man said, obviously trying to get a rise out of him, lashing out in the hopes of hurting him in some way just as he'd been hurt.
"Actually," he said, feeling nothing for the jabs the man had made an attempt at, since none of them had hit any sore spots. "I couldn't care less about the 'Great' Harry Potter."
"Then why?" the man asked, looking almost mystified, unable to comprehend the fact that someone would go so far for someone they didn't care about.
"When I was three, I witnessed a murder." he stated matter-of-factly. "The foreman helped an old drunk named Toby down the stairs outside this office. Gave him a little push..."
"What does that...?" the man asked, finishing his question with a helpless gesture that encompassed the monitors that showed teams of Aurors bagging and tagging a trio of bodies.
"The foreman was the one who sat me aside and gave me a number of lessons which made me the man I am today. I could say that I owe everything to Henry Evans." he said, giving the man another reptilian smile.
Strongly suspecting that he was being given an unpaid babysitting job, the boy named Jim held out his arms for the baby that the red-haired woman had asked him to look after. Rather than being light like one of the dolls that belonged to a girl down the street, the small blanket wrapped bundle that the woman handed to him was startlingly heavy.
"His name is Harry James Potter" Lily said. "I named him Harry after my father, and while my husband claims the James part is after him since it is tradition in his family for a firstborn son to be given the father's first name as a middle name, I named him after a different James."
The boy looked up into the woman's catlike eyes, his own eyes asking a question.
"I named him after a brave boy who stayed with my father until the end, even though..." Lily continued before finding herself unable to finish the statement.
Decades later, that same boy now grown to a man walked out of the ruins of the place which he could almost confidently claim was the place where it all started, not caring for the mess he'd left behind him. Honor, what little of it he had, had been satisfied tonight and the wrong that had been committed against the Potters had been redressed. Potter wouldn't appreciate the gesture and would try to capture him if he learned of it, but then again it hadn't been made for him.
Funny, James Moriarty thought as his mind turned to the current generation of Henry Evans' family. Funny that the one who had been named for a man like Evans, and for...What was it that Holmes called me? Oh yes, the "Napoleon of crime"...that one who had been named for men such as us could be as unlike us as Harry Potter is.